We have lived with violence far too long.
ADRIENNE RICHThis is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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he ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves.
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… this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
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In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe.
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Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.
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And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
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To become a token woman – whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters – is to become something less than a man.
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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
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What it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
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I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don’t mean that everyone can write poetry – it’s an art, a craft.
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It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.
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If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
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For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
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It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
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A language is a map of our failures.
ADRIENNE RICH